Users have a much larger vocabulary of workflow "conditions" and "actions" to choose from, including such Notes-like items as changing permissions on a document after it is submitted for approval, sending mail notifications, and moving content to another location. You can now design workflows that operate at the site or list levels, reuse workflows across an entire site collection and even export them for use on a completely different SharePoint farm.
10. Business Connectivity Services and External Lists: Because Notes has many capabilities for connecting to external systems like relational databases and enterprise applications, some of the Notes applications may simply be front-ends for some backend system.
SharePoint 2010 replaces SharePoint 2007's limited Business Data Catalog with a much more powerful external data connector called Business Connectivity Services (BCS). With this new facility, you can search, read and write content in your back-end systems and allows you to expose this content as an External List, which looks and feels like a native SharePoint list that you can easily include as part of any SharePoint page.
This opens up the very interesting possibility of migrating your Notes content to SQL Server and still keeping the main user interface in SharePoint. Many of the new capabilities mentioned above, such as InfoPath list forms, are still available when your data resides external to SharePoint.
We've talked about 10 aspects of SharePoint 2010 that will make life a lot easier for organizations transitioning from Lotus Notes to SharePoint. While other non-Notes features of SharePoint 2010 will appeal to administrators and developers, decisions about what can and should be migrated come down to capabilities and cost. How much will it cost to migrate content and application design? What will my applications look like and what will they be able to do when I get there?
SharePoint 2010 addresses both of these questions in a big way, and already has accelerated the rate of Notes migrations around the world.
Steve Walch has been a Lotus Notes and Microsoft technologist since 1993, and has built a number of successful products. In 2002, he founded Proposion Software, which eventually focused on Notes-to-SharePoint migration and integration tools, and became the leading vendor in the market. Quest Software acquired Proposion in 2007. Steve keeps his Notes SharePoint blog filled with postings about his favorite migration tool.
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